The Origins of Trump’s Greenland Obsession

Donald Trump’s pursuit of Greenland started with an intelligence briefing in the Situation Room. It was early 2018, and rising Russian submarine activity and the increased presence of Chinese vessels in the Arctic represented a security threat, Trump was told. At that meeting, according to a senior White House official at the time and a second person familiar with the conversation, Trump became preoccupied with the idea that the U.S. required a bigger and more permanent presence in Greenland, because of its strategic location in the North Atlantic.

That May, Trump was visiting Long Island for a political event when he met briefly with Ronald Lauder, a longtime friend and heir to the cosmetics fortune. Lauder told him Denmark was struggling economically and suggested that the U.S. could leverage that strain to buy Greenland outright, according to the former White House official.

When Trump’s interest in buying Greenland was first reported that year, it struck critics as a characteristically provocative but unserious gambit—expansionist bluster from a President given to floating outlandish ideas. But Trump was serious. Nor was he the first Commander in Chief to entertain the idea. In the 19th century, William Seward, the Secretary of State who negotiated the purchase of Alaska under Andrew Johnson, argued the case for acquiring Greenland was “political and commercial,” citing its vast territory and mineral wealth. But no offer was ever made. President Harry Truman revived the idea in 1949, at one point proposing to purchase the island from Denmark in exchange for $100 million in gold and oil rights in Alaska.

What bothered Trump most, according to three sources close to him, was the sense that the U.S. had already ceded power over Greenland once before. In the early 1950s, it built and operated Thule Air Base—now called Pituffik Space Base—largely as an American enclave, central to missile defense and nuclear deterrence. During the Cold War, America exercised de facto control over Greenland for military purposes. Danish oversight was limited and largely nominal; when strategic imperatives collided with questions of sovereignty, American security priorities prevailed. But after the Cold War ended, the U.S. reduced its Greenland footprint, closing or consolidating installations while maintaining Thule as an outpost. Denmark re-established political control of the base, even as it continued to rely on American security guarantees. When Trump learned this history, he thought the situation smacked of weakness—another case of the U.S. surrendering assets while European allies enjoyed the benefits.

In discussions with friends and aides, he kept bringing Greenland up. First-term advisers say that had it not been for a litany of domestic distractions, the U.S. would have more aggressively pursued the purchase of Greenland then. The idea, however, stayed with Trump. “Because of all the trials and tribulations of Trump 1.0, we never got there,” says retired Lieut. General Keith Kellogg, a former top national-security aide. “Now we’re there.”

In recent months, Trump has made the acquisition of the vast frozen island of a mere 56,000 people a sustained priority. He frames control of Greenland as a security imperative in an era of Arctic competition, warning that Russian militarization and Chinese commercial advances have left the U.S. exposed. He has threatened to apply economic pressure on Denmark and its allies, dangled the idea of using military force to seize the island before ruling it out, and installed informal emissaries to explore ways to gain permanent control of the island—or, failing that, uncontested strategic access. The campaign so unsettled NATO allies that when Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney declared a “rupture in the world order,” at the World Economic Forum, what leaped to mind was Greenland. 

Days later, Trump declared the “framework of a deal” with Danish officials had been reached. He offered no specifics, and two Danish sources tell TIME the outline did not include U.S. control or ownership of the autonomous territory. 

Upcoming negotiations will test how far Trump is willing to go to get Greenland. But the President’s fixation is bigger than control of the remote territory. It points to a broader ambition to redraw the architecture of American influence, loosen the constraints imposed by historic alliances, and anchor U.S. security policy in the western hemisphere. Greenland is a window into the animating logic of Trump’s foreign policy: a determination to reorder the world to his liking, and to accomplish what others had contemplated and abandoned, through the exercise of personal power. “He’s going to do what he wants to do,” says Kellogg. “And then everyone’s got to follow.”

In the days after the 2024 election, cocooned in Mar-a-Lago and plotting the priorities of his second term, Trump talked often about his desire to acquire Greenland, aides say. He raised the idea repeatedly—sometimes offhandedly, sometimes with more insistence, as though it were a deal awaiting the right intermediary. His lieutenants didn’t wait long to get started.

In early January 2025, Trump’s incoming director of White House personnel Sergio Gor called Charlie Kirk, who was staying at a donor’s house in West Palm Beach and spending his days inside Trump’s mansion, helping with the vetting operation during the presidential transition. “We should go to Greenland,” Gor told him. “The President wants to buy it.”

Kirk agreed. Trump and Susie Wiles, his incoming chief of staff, signed off on the idea of a brief, unplanned visit—not a diplomatic mission, but rather a gesture meant to signal Trump’s intent. At 3 a.m. on Jan. 7, 2025, Kirk and Gor boarded Trump’s plane along with Donald Trump Jr. The trio flew to Nuuk, with its low-slung pastel buildings pressed between dark water and bare rock. They were on the ground for only a few hours. The trip included no substantive meetings and no formal outreach to Greenlandic or Danish officials. It produced a photograph instead. Standing in a windswept town square beneath a low, overcast sky, the three men posed briefly before departing. Trump posted the image to his social media platform Truth Social. “I am hearing the people of Greenland are MAGA,” he wrote.

By early March, Trump was framing U.S. access to the island as a national-security necessity. Later that month, the Administration orchestrated a high-profile visit by Vice President J.D. Vance, the first by a sitting American Vice President to the territory. Greenland’s government said it had not invited Vance and opposed the visit, prompting plans for local protests. After diplomatic pushback from Nuuk and Copenhagen, the itinerary was scaled back to a stop at Pituffik Space Base, emphasizing the U.S. military presence while avoiding public engagement with Greenlandic officials. The protests were canceled, but the unease remained.

The episode marked the start of a more confrontational phase. Trump and his aides emphasized expanded basing rights and permanent access, while Danish leaders reiterated that sovereignty was nonnegotiable. In early April, Denmark’s Prime Minister traveled to Greenland to reinforce that position publicly. Negotiations followed: Denmark approved expanded U.S. defense arrangements on its own territory while warning that any attempt to annex Greenland would void cooperation. To formalize the effort, Trump appointed a special envoy tasked specifically with Greenland and Arctic negotiations. At the same time, European governments, led by Denmark, mounted a show of force, deploying troops to Greenland from France, Germany, Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, and elsewhere under the banner of Operation Arctic Endurance, generating more friction with the U.S.

Acquiring Greenland, aides say, would support what Trump has called the Golden Dome, a proposed system designed to detect and destroy ballistic, hypersonic, and cruise missiles through a constellation of sensors and space-based interceptors. The objective, according to a senior Administration official, is to beef up regional security. “If you have instability within your own neighborhood,” the official says, “it’s very hard to project power elsewhere.” There’s also a strategic advantage, the official says, to gaining access to Greenland’s mineral wealth—rare earths and critical metals Trump believes the U.S. foolishly left to rivals.

In early January, Trump threatened new tariffs on Denmark and several European partners unless progress was made toward a deal. Facing resistance from European allies and growing strain within NATO at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting, Trump walked back those threats and ruled out the American use of force to seize Greenland. Looking for an off-ramp, he returned with a provisional understanding to continue negotiations with the Danes, saying they reached the basis of a deal but offering no specifics.

Trump loyalists insist he won’t let the pursuit of Greenland fade again. His strategy will be to apply “extreme pressure,” an aide says, “using modern communications and media as a weapon, not a tool, browbeating people and getting the closest deal to what you want, thinking you come back and get another bite later.”

It is far from clear the strategy will succeed. But to his most ardent defenders, Trump’s demonstrated willingness to shatter norms is what makes the acquisition of the island a plausible outcome, not a mere fantasy. “His objective is total control in Greenland,” says his former chief strategist Steve Bannon. “I believe we’ll have total control.”